Trump has given an order that federal buildings from now on have to be beautiful.

But then…beautiful according to whom? Trump? But…

Donald Trump decreed on Monday that all new US federal buildings should be “beautiful”, in a long-expected executive order which excoriated architectural modernism but stopped short of demanding that all such projects should be in the classical style.

So he’ll allow for some in the modern vulgarian goldy goldy goldy style?

When a draft of the order first surfaced, in February, critics reacted with horror to its promise to “make federal buildings beautiful again” by mandating a return to “the classical architectural style”.

So there’s no beauty in this?

Ten months later, and with the end

BBC media editor Amol Rajan has made a prize for best writing and he announced the winners today.

And so we come again to that glorious moment, just ahead of what I hope is a restful festive season for you and your family, when I wheel out my favourite prose of the year, under the auspices of an implicit endorsement from my long dead hero.

You know, to give you a bit of holiday reading when you’ve eaten too many pies.

Welcome to the Russell Prize 2020.

Why Russell?

Before we get to them, I should remind you that the Russell Prize is named for my hero, Bertrand Russell, who together with George Orwell wrote the best non-fiction prose

So a few hours before he leaves Barr sets fire to his enslavement to Trump. Way too late, dude, you won’t get any credit for it now.

Still, the rest of us can take a little pleasure from how much it will enrage the rotting pumpkin.

Attorney General William Barr used his final public appearance to undercut President Donald Trump on multiple fronts Monday, saying he saw no reason to appoint a special counsel to look into the president’s claims about the 2020 election or to name one for the tax investigation of President-elect Joe Biden’s son.

In the course of breaking with Trump on matters that have been consuming the president, Barr also reinforced the belief of federal

Trump’s mind is on………..

…………getting someone to get the necessary process going to get an Important airport named after him.

(What do Donald Trump and Eddie Izzard have in common? Laser-like focus on The Self to the exclusion of all others.)

In the dying days of his presidency, Donald Trump has taken to asking some aides and advisers about the process of naming airports after former U.S. presidents, according to two people who’ve heard him recently inquiring on this.

He asked one of the two what kind of paperwork is necessary to get an airport named after a former president. Sir, you need to request Form 4728B from the Department of Egotism sir.

Another individual close to Trump told

Rupert Murdoch got the vaccine.

Media baron Rupert Murdoch received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine this week, a day before prominent opinion host Fox News’s Tucker Carlson raised suspicion over the marketing strategy for the vaccine.

The 89-year-old executive chairman of Wall Street Journal owner News Corp and chairman of Fox News’s Fox Corp received the vaccine at his local doctor’s office in Britain on Wednesday after being told he was eligible, a spokeswoman confirmed on Friday.

There are frontline workers and healthcare workers who haven’t had it yet, but he was eligible.

On Thursday evening, Carlson, host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” one of the highest rated shows on U.S. cable news, opened his show highlighting the case

Via Glinner’s post, Eddie Izzard’s heart-rending story of being persecuted by three teenage girls when he joined them in the women’s toilet on his first day going out dressed in “women’s clothes.”

Most of what I remember about my first day walking around outside in makeup and a dress was fear. The fear of being stared at, which I knew I would be. This was partly because I wasn’t that good at applying makeup.

Ah the fear of being stared at. A little different from the fear of being assaulted.

I had a little bag I’d brought with me with my other clothing to change back into. So at the end of the afternoon, I came back on the

Boys' club culture: male comedian thinks other male comedian should be able to walk all over women's & lesbians' boundaries because he admires his work. This is why men hire & promote men over women; why men get bigger salaries, why sexual harassment complaints get ignored, etc. https://t.co/PirGzoZX61

— Arty Morty (@artymortyarty) December 20, 2020

It’s no skin of James Harris’s nose, is it. Men ignoring women’s boundaries is no threat to him, so by all means Eddie Izzard should do whatever he wants.

Graham Linehan is not impressed with what his colleague is doing.

I know a woman who met Eddie and he thought it would be a laugh to go into the women’s toilets with her. She

The philosopher Miroslav Imbrišević has a post at The Electric Agora on language and the concept of “women.”

Conceptual engineering has been taken up by some feminist philosophers. A central concept in feminist philosophy is ‘woman’. Ordinarily it means “adult human female,” but some feminists would like to include transwomen under the term ‘woman’. This view is now widely accepted in academic feminism. If you dare to question this, you will be considered “transphobic,” as Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor at the University of Sussex, has experienced.

But the rest of us are still struggling to understand how any feminist can think it’s feminist to include male people in the concept “woman” on the grounds that they are trans … Read the rest

Stupidest headline ever.

Eddie Izzard praised for use of she/her pronouns in latest TV appearance https://t.co/bBO593u18k

— The Independent (@Independent) December 20, 2020

… Read the rest

Gosh what has happened to Trump, Mitt Romney wonders.

Trump’s flirtation with declaring martial law in battleground states and appointing a conspiracy theorist as special counsel to help his attempt to overturn defeat by Joe Biden are “really sad” and “nutty and loopy”, Mitt Romney said on Sunday.

Or, more precisely, criminal and traitorous.

“He’s leaving Washington with a whole series of conspiracy theories and things that are so nutty and loopy that people are shaking their head wondering what in the world has gotten into this man,” the Utah Republican senator said.

No we’re not. Nothing has gotten into him: this is what he is. He’s psychopathic in his indifference to everyone but himself, and he’s a … Read the rest

The public coup plotting keeps chugging along.

President Trump said Sunday that he has spoken with Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville, the Alabama Republican who suggested last week that he supports a potential challenge to the electoral vote count when the House and Senate convene next month to formally affirm President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

A “challenge” meaning “No no no we don’t want to!!”

Trump told Giuliani in a radio interview that he talked to the future senator last night.

Biden last week achieved formal victory over Trump, winning his 306 votes in the electoral college and advancing one more step toward inauguration. But the president and his supporters are redoubling their efforts to block the normal transfer of power, including

The Post has a big wrap-up story on how badly Trump failed to deal with the pandemic.

In mid-November, expecting a surge of cases after Thanksgiving, four members of the task force decided to try to move the needle.

After their warnings had gone largely unheeded for months in the dormant West Wing, Deborah Birx, Anthony S. Fauci, Stephen Hahn and Robert Redfield together sounded new alarms, cautioning of a dark winter to come without dramatic action to slow community spread.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, among the many Trump aides who were infected with the virus this fall, was taken aback, according to three senior administration officials with knowledge of the discussions. He told the doctors

Oh dear, we’re unacceptable.

In the past weeks there has been an unacceptable upsurge in Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) and transphobic talking points as well as false narratives being expressed within Irish media.

Unacceptable. I guess that means we should be locked up and deprived of all means of communication?

This is happening while the trans community is currently facing massive disruption in the implementation of healthcare reforms, including the potential collapse of healthcare for trans children and teenagers.

It’s not healthcare though. It’s destructive quackery. Women saying that one’s sex can’t be taken off the way one takes off a jacket does not cause the collapse of actual healthcare – the medical kind – for anyone, including children … Read the rest

Oh gee, it would be a little bit unpleasant if Trump staged a coup.

I’ve been covering Donald Trump for a while. I can’t recall hearing more intense concern from senior officials who are actually Trump people. The Sidney Powell / Michael Flynn ideas are finding an enthusiastic audience at the top. https://t.co/NxjC0sUrzI

— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) December 19, 2020

NEW: Senior Trump administration officials are increasingly alarmed that President Trump might unleash — and abuse — the power of government in an effort to overturn the clear result of the election. https://t.co/rYJhRw7MKx

— Axios (@axios) December 19, 2020

Got it; so do we really have to stand around looking helpless while he continues to do this? Wouldn’t it maybe … Read the rest

Time for a quick demo at Target!

Anti-maskers in Arizona invade a Target pic.twitter.com/qMDsG6jjlA

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) December 18, 2020

A group of about 30 people spray their aerosol all over the entrance to a Target store and then depart.

Is that departing line “Bye retards!” or “Buy retards!”? It is a store, after all, and it does sell a large array of objects.… Read the rest

The editor who wrote the headline made a weird choice – Trump Discussed Naming Campaign Lawyer as zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. I think it would have been more eye-catching to focus on the Trump attempting a coup part, but maybe that’s just me.

Anyway. The campaign lawyer bit is also batshit, to be fair.

President Trump on Friday discussed making Sidney Powell, who as a lawyer for his campaign team unleashed a series of conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines in the United States, a special counsel investigating voter fraud, according to two people briefed on the discussion.

Well duh. Only someone who traffics in batshit conspiracy theories is going to believe in the “voter fraud” myth.

Most

Remember, kids, everything is worse for trans people – earthquakes, racism, fleas, pandemics, misogyny, Starbucks, everything. Miscarriages? Worse for trans people, obviously.

A 32-year-old man with obesity, Sam, arrived at the emergency room to be treated for intermittent abdominal pain that had been going on for 8 hours, according to a case described in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2019.

We can see where this is going already.

A triage nurse chalked this up to his “untreated chronic hypertension” and designated his symptoms as “nonurgent.”

Sam told the nurse that he was transgender, had taken a pregnancy test that was positive, had not menstruated in years, and had “peed himself” earlier that day. Yet

Joe Biden wants to punch him out but Jill Biden says nope.

“That was such a surprise,” she told CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert on Thursday, seated next to her husband, Joe Biden. “It was really the tone of it … He called me ‘kiddo’. One of the things that I’m most proud of is my doctorate. I mean, I worked so hard for it.”

Why did he call her “kiddo”? It seems so over the top – like caricaturing his own caricature. The whole thing was facetious, but it’s that kind of facetious that is just a phony pretense of not really being insulting because aw come on aincha got no sense of humor? Jokey-insulting. So why … Read the rest

Why not shepherds? Priests? Angels?

America’s newest branch of the military is about to celebrate the end of its first year, and now members of the Space Force will have something to call each other.

Vice President Mike Pence announced on Friday that members will be called “guardians.”

On the one hand it sounds a bit fascist, and on the other hand it sounds soppy. We’re not orphans, we don’t need “guardians.”

“It is my honor on behalf of the president of the United States to announce that henceforth the men and women of the United States Space Force will be known as guardians,” Pence told an audience at the White House. “Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and guardians will be

Trump is soothing his poor bruised ego with the thick poultice of cash he’s fooled a lot of people into giving him.

Deflated by a loss he has yet to acknowledge, Mr. Trump has cushioned the blow by coaxing huge sums of money from his loyal supporters — often under dubious pretenses — raising roughly $250 million since Election Day along with the national party.

Not bad as a consolation prize.

His astonishing talent for raising money by being a flaming asshole means he is still the boss of the Republicans.

Mr. Trump has long acted with few inhibitions when it comes to spending other people’s money, and he has spent millions of campaign dollars on his own family businesses